“Distinguishing Christmas from Its Wrappings”

Religion in Daily Life (c) By the Rev. Edward Chinn, D.Min. Rector, All Saints’ Church 9601 Frankford Ave. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19114 (215) 637-5225 Written 13 December 2001 http://www.allsaintstorresdale.org

“Christmas is when you burn all the wrappings and then discover you can’t find the 20-dollar bill you got as a present” (Mad Magazine, January 1969). We are liable to lose the meaning of Christmas unless we distinguish the reality from its wrappings.

The wrappings of Christmas are familiar and surprisingly recent. Lancaster, Pennsylvania, resident Matthew Zahm’s diary entry for December 20, 1821, is the first mention of a Christmas tree in the New World. Though the legend of Saint Nicholas goes back to the fourth century, our modern image of Santa Claus started in 1822 when an Episcopal Seminary professor (Clement Clarke Moore) wrote the poem, “The Night Before Christmas.” Thomas Nast, a cartoonist, drew our plump Santa in Harper’s Weekly from 1863 to 1886. In 1828, Dr. Joel Roberts Poinsett, first U.S. ambassador to Mexico, brought the plant from there to the States. The plant was later named for him. Sending commercially-printed Christmas cards originated in London in 1843. London artist John Calcott Horsley designed the first card. The familiar figure of Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, started as a poem from Montgomery Ward in its advertising in 1939. In 1949 Gene Autry sang the song based on the poem.

The reality of Christmas is not about a human being who has spiritual experiences. It is about a spiritual Being who had human experiences. In AD 55, the Apostle Paul wrote a letter in which he quoted an earlier hymn about Christ. The hymn sees Christ as the embodiment of spiritual Being: “He always had the nature of God, but he did not think that by force he should remain equal with God. Instead of this, of his own free will he gave up all he had . . . He became like a human being and appeared in human likeness” (Philippians 2:6-7, TEV). Likewise, in his letter to the Galatians (written in the early 50s), Paul wrote about Christ as “The Son,” a spiritual Being who existed before his human birth at Bethlehem. Paul wrote, “But when the right time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman” (Galatians 4:4, NLT). Paul sums up the reality of Christmas in these words: “God was in Christ making all human beings his friends” (2 Corinthians 5:19, TEV).

The story of Jesus is not an Abraham Lincoln-like story of one who went from a log cabin to the White House. Rather, the story is about One who left Eternity’s “White House” to be born in a “log cabin,” the cave of Bethlehem. A Christian in AD 150 wrote that God “sent him (Christ) as sending God; in flesh to us he came.” Don’t let the wrappings hide the reality of Christmas from you.